Thursday, November 7, 2013

November Morning Sky ft. Orion and the Seven Sisters

I woke up to take the dog out at 5:00am this morning, and saw that the sky was clear. Sirius and Jupiter were blazing in the crisp, alarmingly cool air. It's been raining for the past few days, so I was super excited to get outside and get some photos.

I started on the balcony with a wide angle shot of the Orion neighborhood (from Sirius to the Pleiades). I tried a bunch of different settings to see if I could stumble upon something cool, or find a way to increase the number of stars without adding to the light pollution. Here's the final result...

Final result with adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW

Below is the same photo pre-adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW. Notice the prevalence of sky glow and washed out stars. At least the stars were sharp, unlike the shot I took with the aperture wide open.Check out the results from a variety of settings...

Same photo as above, f/4.5, 15 sec, ISO 800, 18mm unprocessed

Screen shot of Adobe Camera RAW (check the settings on the right if you want to do something similar)

Trying the same scene with different settings, f/3.5, 15 sec, ISO 800, 18mm (wide open aperture isn't as sharp)

Trying the same scene with different settings, f/11, 15 sec, ISO 1600, 18mm (very sharp but not much light coming in)

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